I want to take advantage of this day of the eve before the feast of Sol Invictus
on December 25, a very important date in the sacred calendar of the Traditional Roman Spirituality, to do some personal reflections.
I have got the fateof being born and living under the influence of Saturn, a divine force very difficult to handle and definitely not very linear and predictable.
In this period of the year - so particularly permeated by this energy - I'm
always subjected to a strong agitation and tension: in dealing with this condition I do
use all my strength.
I must say that the Traditional Roman Spirituality provides me with many
tools in this attempt to gain inner calm and quiet even for "being able to look
straight into the eyes this God" without losing control.
All this makes me think that the knowledge of the Via can not become a true wisdom if not realized. Theories, rituals, candles, altars, invocations are just talk and smoke when not translated into a real practice. And it's necessary that all this amount of knowledge can be put into action in an active way. It must become a tool to learn about themselves and deal with life even in its everyday seemingly obvious aspects.
Undertaking the Via it is not enough. We must also stay there. And undertaking the Via is the easiest part of the issue: The most difficult problem is to stay on the Via without getting lost.
We must therefore build in ourselves the force that ensures a
continuous interaction between the search for inner peace and outer
world, between personal cultivation and responsibilities in the everyday life, between the awakening of the self-awareness and action in the
world.
Undertaking the Via does not mean making a choice of ascetic life with
detachment from the world, we do not withdraw, we will not flee or hide
in an ideal dimension. We must cultivate ourselves in harmony with the world around us, for good or bad, in peace as in the storm. And this can help us in looking straight in the eye a titanic force like that of Saturn.
4 commenti:
Every year I too feel this "strong agitation and tension" that you speak of in the last couple of weeks in December. I have found this so for as long as I can remember. I am glad to know this is not necessarily a personal experience. This year I feel I have connected with Saturn better than any other - partly this may be because my ritual practice has been more sincere but perhaps another aspect of this is manifested through my increasing fascination with the Roman concept of time. We go from the Saturnian "golden age" to increasingly less salubrious times, which is to say we are not necessarily becoming better/more virtuous/happier but perhaps are becoming less so. From this perspective we are becoming more ruthless, more greedy, less humane and less trusting of the natural order/universe/cosmos and more disrespectful to it. I wonder what your perspective on this is.
Dear Friend
first of all thank you for writing. You comment, as usual, is an occasion for me for better focusing topics and issues: it's an important occasion for me to deeper think about critical aspects fo this spiritual path which sometimes I consider, for me also, as simply "given". In your comment you cite two interesting topics. With regards to the first one, it's not easy to talk about personal aspects: I think however that everyone of us is a sort of small Universe and in this period of the year the Tradition indicates, in very simple words, that the Great Universe tends to be upside-down. I think that someone of us is more sensitive to this condition which is reflected also in our innner life-universe. Of course the topic is more complex than this but it is not possible to talk about it in this occasion. I will keep this discussion open for the future (when we will meet somehow and somewhere...)
The second issue is even more complex. As you surely know, our Tradition considers time in a non-linear way but rather circular: a spyral. We are living in a well defined time cycle where even the disorder which connotes our times, has its own place and sense. We are living in the time of ruins but these ruins are the exact conditions of the hystorical cycle which we live in. The present times cannot have different features because these are the features of the Kali Yuga - our times. The possibility to consider this disorder, this chaos, this human, social, environmental degrade, these ruins as "normal" components of the order of th historical cycles of the Roman Tradition depends on the personal capabilities one may have to live over, to see beyond and behind this disorder. This condition is also the only possibility to understand the real meaning and sense of the present World linked to the Universal Laws regulating the present mankind. A cultor or a cultrix has to be completely freed from the mentality which connotes these time of degrade and corruption because this mentality, even in religious terms, implies a total ignorance and negation of the Sacred Laws (see for example the foolish tacit/explicit intollerance of Monoteism). I would like to add something more but it is not possibile. As I said in my previous comment, we will widely discuss this topic when we will have the possibility to meet...
What a lovely reply and how right you are to point out the cyclical nature of time. We see that every year in the sense that December is widely agreed to be an end, a kind of death, which is immediately followed by the new beginning that Janus’ month represents. Then there are the seasons, weeks, days, hours and minutes of the year – the moment is constantly dying and being reborn. Historically too we see this – the renaissance was indeed a kind of “rebirth” which followed the dark ages and the most deadly plague in recorded history.
Until the last few hundred years the birth and death rate was much higher and many more people were agricultural workers – these things would have brought the reality of the cycle of life and death home much more than it is now. The mainstream view in secular, so called developed nations tends to see death as something very final, it is essentially the end – a ceasing. This is a linear view of time I suppose. I have read a little Lucretius recently and I think he may be the antidote to this tendency – even if secular society thinks reincarnation is an embarrassing superstition the simple principle of ex nihilo nihil fit implies that life, or at least the universe, is as eternal as it is incessantly changing.
When one really understands the moment is fleeting it loses its intensity and we walk more lightly and hopefully with more wisdom and joy. All too often though, intense emotion anchors us into a prison-ship of unhappiness and failure to really understand that emotions are like clouds – constantly changing – and so we take ourselves much too seriously.
I do hope we will meet one day though I have no idea when I will next be in Europe – everyday responsibilities are a prison-ship of their own …
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